5. TextboxEditMask

link: http://gallery.expression.microsoft.com/en-us/CMEditMaskBehavior

For data input, there is nothing like a TextBox that handles all the formatting for you.  Jim Fisher has created a behavior that enables you to easily add a mask to a TextBox, ensuring your users aren’t entering garbage.  For more information, check out Jim’s post.

4. Resize Behavior

link: http://gallery.expression.microsoft.com/en-us/ResizeBehavior

Blend has a built in behavior for dragging.  As a user, one of the first things I want to do after dragging an object is to resize it.  Alessio Galdy has created a behavior that does exactly this.  Take a look at the sample on the Gallery to see his feature rich resize behavior.

3. Swivel Behavior

link: http://gallery.expression.microsoft.com/en-us/SwivelBehavior

Silverlight 3 introduced a number of features that many consider “eye candy” (pixel shaders, perspective 3d, animations easing).   John Papa uses the perspective 3d feature to create a swivel behavior.  This can be helpful if you, or your clients, need to conserve space.  Think about a menu with an overview and details section.  Simply create two views, attach this behavior, and one side you have the overview and the other are your details.

2. Mouse Wheel Scroll Behavior

link: http://gallery.expression.microsoft.com/en-us/MouseWheelScroll

I can’t count the number of times I’ve gone to a Silverlight app and started using my mouse wheel to scroll through the ListBox, ScrollViewer, or ComboBox.  Along with not putting the Hand cursor on Buttons, this is my biggest pet peeve in Silverlight apps.  With Kelps’ behavior, you can easily add mouse wheel scrolling to scrollable areas.

1. Behaviors from MIX’09

link: http://gallery.expression.microsoft.com/en-us/MIXBehaviorPack

These are the first set of behaviors you should download.  Posted by Peter Blois, of the Blend team, these behaviors include:

• Media behaviors (Play, Pause, Rewind, and Stop)
• Triggers, including an awesome MouseGestureTrigger and a StateChangedTrigger
• Data behaviors – if using MVVM, these behaviors can save you a lot of time

Needless to say, this package is the real deal.

Honorable Mention - Multi-Touch Drag and Zoom Behaviors

link: http://gallery.expression.microsoft.com/en-us/MultiTouch

This is a relatively new behavior to the Gallery (by a new Silverlight MVP, Davide Zordan) and unfortunately I haven’t taken a look at it because it requires a multitouch screen, which I am lacking.  If you do, check it out.  Additionally, read Davide’s post on this behaviors implementation.

Best Behaviors not on the Expression Community Gallery – Physics Helper

These set of behaviors enable you to quickly add physics to objects without having to dive into the world of a physics engine.  I highly recommend you check out “The Basics” video to get learn how to use the behaviors. 

On October 1st I was awarded the Microsoft MVP for Silverlight.  I am very honored and excited about this.  The MVP program, taken from Tim Heuer’s post, “ is a recognition program that is in place to recognize and reward those individuals who have been identified by individuals (peers, Microsoft staff, etc.) as experts in their technology field and global contributors to the technology”

The other talented group of guys in this round of Silverlight MVP’s are (for the complete list of Silverlight MVP’s follow this link):

• Jeff Paries
• Ambrose Little
• Robby Ingebretsen
• Rick Barraza
• Bryant Likes 
• Davide Zordan
• Huijun Li

Talking about and working with Silverlight has been a dream come true.  It enables me to pursue my passion of creating experiences and not applications (more to come on that). 

There have been many people who have helped me in the MVP process; namely Glen Gordon, Jesse Liberty, Tim Heuer, John Papa, and Justin Angel.  Thank you, and I look forward to the upcoming year.

Problem: Silverlight 2 & Silverlight 3 do not support HTML, how can I remove the tags?

Solution: Although there are many solutions to this problem, the quickest and most frequently solution I use is a regular expression to remove HTML tags.  The most straightforward example I’ve found is from John Papa’s book Data Driven Services with Silverlight 2

// Remove HTML tags and empty newlines and spaces and leading spaces
string formattedValue = REgex.Replace(value as string, "<.*?>", "");
formattedValue = Regex.Replace(formattedValue, @"\n+\s+", "\n\n");
formattedValue = formattedValue.TrimStart(’ ‘);
fromattedValue = HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(formattedValue);
if(length > 0 && formattedValue.Length >= length)
  formattedvalue = formattedValue.Substring(0, length - 1);
return formattedValue;

Problem: You need text to dynamically add elipses, "…",  to the end of a sentence.  The difficulty is how do you detect the actual length of the string.  All characters are not created the same.  Ten i’s != ten m’s.

Solution: Robby Ingebretsen at NerdPlusArt.com (and of Kaxaml fame) has a dynamic control that does just this.  http://blog.nerdplusart.com/archives/texttrimming-textblock-for-silverlight.

The solution is very Elegant.  Robby wraps a TextBlock in a Content control then manipulates the Text inside based on the size.  Best of all…he as post code and an example.  Thanks Robby.

Certainly I want to stay current and come out with latest and greatest but in doing so I’ve lost site point of my blog keep it simple and keep track of what I’ve learned.  So, the next few posts will be focused on keeping it simple.

Thanks for reading and helping make this blog great.

Over the past six months I’ve had the amazing opportunity to work with a highly talented team (Mason Brown, Casey Britt, SmartyP, and many more) at IQ Interactive.  We’ve been working on an amazing, ground breaking, Silverlight application.  There wasn’t a stone unturned while developing.  Items such as Pixel Shaders, custom Panels, animations for purpose (as they should be), LINQ, dynamic loading of xap, Prism, and much more illustrate the breadth of the technology. I want to share the experience/application with you so badly but it will have to wait until the end of this month.

The biggest win over the past months is not the use of technology, but the team.  When I joined there was a large Silverlight project without any Silverlight knowledge.  Everyone rallied, designers were brought up to speed on Blend and Flash devs were put to work.  IQ now has a competent and competitive team of Silverlight developers/designers, and I am so happy to have been, and continue to be part of that. 

Over the next few month, and into the beginning of next year, I will be taking on a consultant role with IQ to ensure the project sails smoothly into launch and advice  with the direction of IQ’s Silverlight practice.  Doing this enables me to work on a number of key Silverlight projects in the media space in Turin, Italy.  Hopefully the jet lag wears off soon, because I’m ready to dig in, build awesome Silverlight projects, and most importantly build another team of kick ass Silverlight developers.

From Turin – ciao ciao

The other day i saw a quote from Ambrose Little that couldn’t have been more accurate about Twitters impact on my life.  Simply put, it has killed my blog.  Instead of blogging about smaller items or topics, it’s so much easier, and faster, for me to microblog (i.e. tweet)  instead blog.  From the surface it’s seems great: my time is reduced in composing, it’s now just 140 characters, and it cuts down on your time because you can quickly digest information.

I think it’s time to take a step back and really determine what should be blogged, and what should be tweeted?  This will take time to answer, and there will be many opinions for both.  For me I am going to start erroring on the side of Blogging.

More to come.

It would be great to have more Triggers in SL, but for now, let’s take a look at the Loaded trigger.  It’s particularly interesting because you can handle the visuals of an element becoming visible.  Adding a build on (like fade in) transition to your elements in your application is something small, but adds polish, and should be encouraged.

The below Xaml shows the fading in of the LayoutRoot using the Loaded Trigger.

<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Opacity="1">
  <Grid.Triggers>
    <EventTrigger RoutedEvent="Grid.Loaded">
      <BeginStoryboard>
        <Storyboard x:Name="LayoutRootLoaded">
          <DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames BeginTime="00:00:00"
              Storyboard.TargetName="LayoutRoot"
              Storyboard.TargetProperty="(UIElement.Opacity)">
            <EasingDoubleKeyFrame KeyTime="00:00:00" Value="0" />
            <EasingDoubleKeyFrame KeyTime="00:00:05" Value="1">
              <EasingDoubleKeyFrame.EasingFunction>
                <ExponentialEase EasingMode="EaseOut" />
              </EasingDoubleKeyFrame.EasingFunction>
            </EasingDoubleKeyFrame>
          </DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames>
        </Storyboard>
      </BeginStoryboard>
    </EventTrigger>
  </Grid.Triggers>

Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find a way to edit a Storyboard defined in a Trigger.  For right now you’ll have to create the Storyboard in the Resources and copy into the Trigger.